Spellslinger Thoughts

Do you have any idea how frustrating Rise of the Argonauts is when you learn the basics about Greek geography? Because half the islands in the game are based off of real places that aren’t islands. Delphi wasn’t an island! Iolcus wasn’t an island! Mycenae wasn’t an island! You would think it wouldn’t be hard considering how many islands Greece actually does have, in both real life and mythology, but nope! Go ahead and turn places you can find on a map into a geographical feature they obviously don’t have.

Anyhow let’s talk about Spellslinger by Sebastian de Castell.

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Spellslinger Thoughts

After reading his Greatcoats series, I decided to pick up Sebastian de Castell’s Spellslinger, which is a fantasy series aimed at a younger audience than his other books and a setting more evocative of the Western. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I didn’t know what a Spellslinger was, and while I loved his Greatcoats books for their plots, humor, setting and action the fact is that those books kind of beat you down a bit with how terrible of a world these characters live in. Their setting is like medieval Gotham on steroids; living there is a nightmare.

So what was Spellslinger going to be like? What would de Castell decide was the sort of thing that a teenage audience would be more comfortable reading? And about halfway through, I decided that Spellslinger was something like what the Inhumans television series would have been like had it been any good.

For reference: the Inhumans television series only lasted one short season, and it was about the royal family of a lost city of Inhumans on the Moon getting banished to Earth. What made this series really bad, other than the terrible special effects and stupid plots, was that the society of Inhumans was terrible. Basically, at a certain age Inhumans got powers. If they had a cool superpower, they became aristocrats who could have a normal life and pursue any career at all. If they had not as cool powers, they became slaves for life. And yet the heroes of this series were those who helped keep this system in place.

Not so in Spellslinger! In this series, we have the Jan’Tep, a society of magic users that must reach a certain threshold of power by sixteen; otherwise, they become Sha’Tep, second class citizens who usually work as servants or slaves in the mines. And our main character Kellen is a young man who starts out by trying to become a Jan’Tep, but as the story goes on and his powers don’t really materialize, he comes to realize that the Jan’Tep society is kind of awful and any reasonable person would hate it.

And the more you learn about it, the more you realize exactly how terrible the Jan’Tep society is, how awful its history is, and how self-deluded it is to keep building on this culture without acknowledging the past violence and oppression that led to it being what it is today.

Now I haven’t finished the series, but I suspect that its take on colonialism's going to be a bit better than the Solider Son trilogy by Robin Hobb. That trilogy ended without actually solving the issue at all, giving the main character a happy ending and then claiming that’s enough. Despite the fact that there’s still an oppressed minority and the two cultures haven’t actually been able to talk through anything. Yeah, “Solving Colonialism” would be a really cheesy way to solve the conflict, but deciding to ignore it wasn’t better. The main character ends up rejoining the sexist, racist imperialist society that rejected him in the first place without that society changing.

And yet this book, Spellslinger, which is the first book in the series, ends with the opposite of that. Not only is Kellen an outcast, but that’s what he wants to be. He’s not without some regrets; he’s got a surprisingly good bond with his sister, and the girl he’s crushing on is going to be left behind as he wanders around with Ferius, but he’s rejected the Jan’Tep society… because it sucks. Because it’s well and truly awful. 

Speaking of Ferius, she’s a lovely character. The stereotypical ‘mysterious woman who rolls into the town’ is, I think, usually a sign of the love interest, but in the case of Ferius she’s not. She’s the mentor figure, if a mentor that’s more interested in teaching by example rather than holding on to Kellen’s hand. I was very relieved by her not being the love interest, nor by any hints of that being the case further on. She’s just a badass lady that doesn’t take crap from anyone anywhere.

Also this book has an animal sidekick? And he’s not especially fluffy. Which maybe felt like it was trying too hard to not be a stereotypical animal sidekick in a kid’s movie, but he was still very fun to read, since he was a lot more practical than Kellen if a lot more concerned with getting shiny things and ripping out enemies’ eyeballs.

I’m very curious of the direction the rest of the series takes though; so much of the first book was about Jan’Tep society, and so at the end of the first novel when Kellen decides to leave it I kind of have to wonder what the rest of the books will be about. Most of the characters will probably be left behind, and while I understand why it makes me wonder how on Earth the series will carry on.

I suppose I’ll find out.

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